The Other Trouble with Flash

The other problem with Flash is that some designers are so enamored of it that they've forgotten how to use web standards—if they ever knew in the first place. As a result, one finds Flash presentations embedded in sites that work only in one or two browsers. The Flash files themselves would work in any browser that contained the plug-in, but the sites have been so miserably authored that many users are unable to access the Flash content. There are even Flash sites that require IE merely to load a Flash presentation. This is like demanding that you use a Zenith (and not a Sony) simply to access your cable TV feed.

When called upon to create a “traditional” standards-based site, these shops use the old methods whose problems we've described in this book, often turning the job over to their junior teams, so senior designers and developers can continue to focus on Flash projects. It's as if the web has stood still since these shops discovered Flash.